Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.
But for an app whose use case doesn’t change and is recurring for no reason? Yeah there’s probably not much value in recurring payments outside of wanting to support the developer. I pay a lot of indie devs out of the goodness of my heart, and I’ll continue to do that.
But the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
It should have been, but the number of people qualified to offer proper scrutiny has been low, and those people have largely been occupied with bigger things. Or they were making those apps and had a conflict of interest.
The point is that now that vibe coding is at a level where it can identify and put together off-the-shelf components, and there are all these end users that don't really care about standardization (it's not like their SaaS products used open, interoperable standards in the first place), the ability to compete with those offerings has exploded.
Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?
... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).
The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.
But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.
Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value.
And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device.
Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas.
Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value.
I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not against paying thousands a year in nice fat profit margins if they provide actual value, like a shit ton of GPU compute time or a well made piece of professional software. The vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.
I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere
You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices
That’s worth more than the cost of any tokens
So much infrastructure is there to support doing "it" in the Cloud, for all definitions of "it." If we can vibe-code bespoke one-offs to solve our problems, a lot of that Cloud interaction goes away... And that stuff is expensive and complicated.
Hypothetically, open source app stores (I'm counting apt here) address this, but then it's someone else's solution to my problem, which doesn't quite fit my problem perfectly.
This approach to software engineering could be what 3D printing is to tangible artifacts (and I mean that including the limits of 3D printing regarding tangible artifacts, but even still.)
Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.
Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.
Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.
I have no philosophical objection to vibe-coding apps for yourself, but personally, I wouldn’t be 1/10th of the engineer I am if I wasn’t constantly exposed to the work of others.
For some, this trend worries software engineers — who needs software if they can vibe code it themselves? — but I am much more optimistic. I think people will start valuing good software a lot more. Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.
Decisions matter, both technical and product ones. LLMs don't make as good technical or product decisions as I would, and the way I work with them tries to maximize my strengths and the LLM's strengths. I don't know if I succeed, but it's better than "make me an app like X" as a prompt.
I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour.
Most apps are very simple and there isn't too much to learn, especially if you're building it to scale to a userbase of yourself. I can't see the need for a ton of CRUD apps which demand subscription fees personally. If you build them yourself, you get to keep your own data, build it out the way you want it, keep it that way, and use computers as a person using a tool as opposed to a customer buying a product.
SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!
Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.
Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.
Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.
As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.
Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.
these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.
there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.
You have to remember that SWE's are the same group that screams "communism" the first moment you mention the word union and they should have the right to make as much money as possible with no restrictions.
This of course leads to the obvious lack of self reflection in their responses when something threatens their future income.
I'm not a SWE because I like money. I'm an SWE because I love programming.
Building all your transportation yourself—whether by breeding horses or assembling a Model T—cuts you off from that accumulated experience. You lose the benefits of thousands of hours spent by others thinking carefully about the same problems.
I have no objection to Model Ts for personal use, but I wouldn’t be one-tenth the traveler I am without constant exposure to well-bred horses.
Some worry cars make horses obsolete—who needs breeders if anyone can buy an engine? I’m more optimistic. As cars proliferate, people will value good horses more. A Model T gets you the first 90%; it’s the last 90%—judgment, robustness, and adaptability—that differentiates."
It's always been free, but because of a change to the way Amazon charges third party app devs, they were going to start charging next month. Since the whole app is just a couple of API calls and storing a record of which orders you've sent the request to already, Claude Code built it in 5 minutes.
In general, the Amazon Seller UI is a cluster (especially since I have one account for each brand, so I constantly have to switch between them). There are lots of subscription apps to make your Amazon data more useful and accessible, but Claude Code with access to the Amazon APIs pretty much replaces all of them. I spend very little time in the actual Amazon UI now and mostly just ask my trusty assistant for the info that I need.
Might have a bit of difficulty naming it that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org).
Edit: I apparently wasn't at all the first to think of this (https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5).
But that’s not what Loom is about.
It’s about streaming the video.
Before:
Capture something with likes of quicktime.
Transcode it so that it doesn’t take a few gigabytes. This takes considerable time and resources (though OBS can do it while recording, not after).
Upload somewhere to share. Wait while it is uploading.
Loom takes care of all those steps so when you press stop you can immediately share the link with someone.
—
Hope other use-cases in the article are not as misrepresented as this one
If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you are just being lazy. I'm the same way, I am incredibly lazy and will constantly tell myself that my time is worth more. This is usually until I realize I'm spending way to much of my "money" to "save time". HourlyWage(time) = money, if I'm saving time by spending money I'm losing time. This is a basic concept and I defy anyone to show me otherwise.
We live in a time where instant gratification is the main driver behind most decisions, devaluing our currency each and every fee we succumb to... as money is time, and if time is being "saved" by spending time (in the form of money) we are now applying a future debt to the work we are doing today. You might work 40 hours one week, where at least 4 hours of that week goes to paying your streaming bill, another 8 for Internet and Phone, as well as another 2 for the coffee you didn't make that week, another hour for your notetaking app on your phone, 30 minutes for your subscription to watch funny youtuber release content early, another 2 hours for you glut of productivity apps, etc. These things all work to keep you a wage-slave till the day you eventually croak with a menial 401k.
It's embarrassing we reduce ourselves to this.
If people enjoy spending their unpaid hours building clones of paid software that's fine, but it's fine because they enjoy it. It's not minimally worth it. The time I waste on YouTube and the news etc etc is sorely needed and enjoyed downtime. If someone has enough energy to build instead of vegetating, more power to them. I prefer to save my energy for the stuff I value. (Which is actual work, helping family and games)
EDIT: another thing to consider is that each hour I spend fully pursuing my occupation pays me an hourly wage but also pays me in career growth. This compounds massively over time in higher and higher wages. Building throwaway apps generally does not. Why would I waste energy on work that doesn't compound? I'm all for serendipity but not as a financial argument.
I build small web applications for my personal needs all the time by just regular programming, and I'm saving so much money by using them and not some proprietary app. Not even mentioning the advantages that it is completely bespoke, runs local and gives me peace of mind data-wise.
Some wise man once said that personal computers are a bicycle for the mind. Programming your own programs is the most pure way you train on that bicycle.
It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that.
I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.
I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.
But I'm not going to start adding features to my bespoke utility to fix someone else's problem.
Sometimes you just want an app does X and Y, but not A, B and Z.
I think that many existing apps with huge userbases will gradually lose users as the models become better and better. Their biggest advantage is that people don't like change, and thus having to e.g. export data from some tools etc. seems to be a hassle not worth $5 a month. But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.
On the other hand, new products will have a much harder time to gather a big userbase. Whenever I'll see a launch of a SaaS asking for $$$, the first question I'll ask myself will be how long it will take LLM to recreate it. And for most cases, I imagine that the time it will take to get 80% of what they have is a few vibe coding sessions (as most newcomers will probably have used LLM themselves to code it up).
I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to write software, even with LLMs, and use it in production. The average computer user does not even use a computer as their primary computing device, they use a phone. The barrier to going from idea to phone app on iPhone or Android is relatively high.
Todo list apps, habit trackers, and the like are almost a special snowflake breed. Almost everyone has some different cross-section of needs they care about, and no app is perfect for each individual. So it's natural to say "is there something that matches what I want?" and then reach for tools to make that. The world is your oyster for todo list apps. Of course, the real issue comes from data sovereignty, trust, quality, things like that. When Apple launches a new device or a new iOS feature people want, you get to see which apps will actually implement the new features or which stagnate. They're a natural avenue for vibe coding since they're so particular.
People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore.
All it needs is the maker mindset of being just lazy enough to be bothered by a repetitive task and the courage (and permission) to use an Agentic LLM to figure out a fix for the issue.
You end up with a system that works right up to the moment it doesn't and fails spectacularly and expensively.
This is one of those reasons you always hear about sweeping medical/hospital records systems being upgraded going tens or hundreds of millions over budget. The edge cases are demons.
Just normal non-coder jobs have massive amounts of repetitive crap that could easily be automated - and already has been automated with Excel - to a degree.
Now Agentic AI lets them automate the rest - or if they're real smart they use an agentic AI model and create an application to do it that doesn't require a LLM subscription.
It's somewhat like the Shortcuts system on steroids.
It would be interesting, particularly for Apple, as this would cannibalize fees charged on the App Store. I imagine they could charge for use of the vibe-coding platform, but Apple hasn't been great at figuring out LLMs.
It would be cool if 3rd partly app platform could provide this functionality, but as I noted in another comment, I cannot even install my own vibe-coded apps to my own iPhone. (Without the 100 USD a year developer tax.) So I'm not sure how the architecture would work on iOS.
Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful.
I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to what I need, and still much more polished than what I could do without LLMs. Will have to think about if there is anything else I can do this with.
Once again, it took me about an hour while watching my shows to get a custom one made.
The first version operated by me downloading the pages one by one to a directory, the Python app parsed the html, downloaded the files and renamed according to thread name.
After a few iterations the tool just grabs a cookies.txt file exported from Firefox and can take any thread URL, browse through it, skipping existing files and determining if everything is already downloaded
I could easily have it just watch a set of threads for new content and download automatically, but the current system is fine =)
I need a simple S3 compatible API to store some files with basic auth and ssl certs using let’s encrypt. Nothing crazy, Garage is overkill, Minio is overkill. I may see if Claude code can handle that for me using python or something.
/btw, I work in consulting and the above project would have a budget of probably $100k and a schedule of 3 months. I see a lot of change for swe consultants coming.
List of projects mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805
If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.
Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.
But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back.
If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it.
If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this.
If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this.
Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.
Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.
In what situation would a simple script or helper app just suddenly rot away and stop working?
Of course it's POSSIBLE to vibe together a massive monstrosity of an everything-app, but that's not what the author is doing here (nor me).
I can hire a contractor to build a carport, or whack one together with some supplies from the Big Box store. More roofs being built with more price points to serve the market.
Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer.
I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago, I own it. (Obviously, I clearly don't in this case.) /rant
I wanted something that felt like an app, so would use iOS design elements, have widgets, use on-device storage (for offline use), etc. Apple, very intentionally I believe, makes a lot of these things harder than they need to be.
- A nice little single-file web "random slideshow" to replace an aging one I bought. - A fairly feature-complete read-only SQL console. - A development SMTP server (like Mailhog) https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel - A work status dashboard that I'll probably release once I have run it a bit longer. - A fairly extensive Docusign-like webapp. - A retrospective meeting runner. - A cron "swiss army knife" helper. - A "social calorie tracker" (I'm unhappy with the existing ones out there).
These are all things I've vibecoded in the last month, and are more than I could have coded in my spare time in 6 months or more.
For me, the renaissance is here.
That’s the whole point - there’s no need for it to be a product when you can do it yourself, and it’s the death knell of products like this.
You can just use it and be content.
FWIW, `better-auth` solves that and LLMs know how to integrate it.
I vibe coded a webapp that I was paying yearly for and the version I made does everything I wish the app I paid for did as it's 100% personalised to me.
I've been thinking for awhile that this is going to be the future and I'm already starting to think of more things I will create.
I haven't published it publicly yet, as i use it personally and it's a little flakey still, but will look to do in the future once I finish adding all the features.
My version is much more feature rich than TeuxDeux and I made it for Free in Google AI studio over the past two months, between other things. I'd just type a prompt and then go do some other stuff, it has taken quite a lot of revision but I haven't written a single line of code and i've been using it daily to manage my tasks since the start of December.
The bar for me to pay for a $10/month software subscription is pretty high, but once I make the decision that it's valuable, the actual cash cost is pretty low. Vibe coding something will never approach the quality of something that someone put enough thought and effort to turn into a product. The main place where I'll write my own software is when it's truly custom to my own needs, AI is a force multiplier for this type of work, but at the end of the day I still have very limited time to run and maintain a lot of custom software and data, so it's not going to cannibalize any of the SaaS I'm willing to pay for.
Obviously for younger software guys with more time than money, the equation will be different, but those were never the make-or-break demographic for SaaS anyway. I don't think the equation has meaningfully changed for SaaS sales due to AI, I see it more as continuously rising bar over the last two decades due to UX expectations, market saturation, limits on human attention and complexity tolerance.
Not everything has to be a SaaS, but I don't think all SaaS apps can be vibe-coded to a weekend project.
If it is solving my issues and problems, why do preaching about the merits of a proper product or paying. I'll pay for what I see value in, and vibe-code where I don't see the benefit of paying.
Maybe I miserably fail and get back to paying to product. It's all good, I take that responsibility while I start my vibe-coding session.
So I decided to vibecode an app for myself and wouldn't you know? It took me a few hours and it's INCREDIBLE! No more relying on someone else to maintain something, I can simply build my own solutions, whenever I want!
But typora is actually one time purchase and one of the rare apps that is priced well with good business model.
They have probably best RTL support and I wanted like your friend to write my own focused markdown editor with RTL support using clause and made some progress but realized that the time and cost of doing this is not worth it. I just paid typora a week ago for $15.
But I understand the point and I use Claude to hack together personal tools all the time.
Once you identify something like Handy, instruct Claude to study how that OSS project actually builds the feature and adapt the logic to your stack. AI is really good at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and understanding the full implementation.
The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces and don't capture everything otherwise. That's what I'm working on at opensource.builders[1]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook of features you can remix across stacks, with structured "skills" that point to the exact details so the porting works reliably.
My projects (Openship/Openfront[0]) are the first on the chopping block. We're creating modular OSS alts for every vertical (barbershops, hotels, etc.) for folks to take, remix, adapt, or fork into their tools. Chances are your AI model is already trained on similar OSS and building from it anyway. We make finding the exact code reliable. Check out our ethos to learn more [1].
We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working.
Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.
I feel like if e.g. Hypercard had lived, this would be a more defacto mode of doing things.
cheers
From the repo here, it looks like its just using swift command line tools, which might just work well enough with cursor/vscode/etc. for small projects. You won't have Xcode's other features but maybe thats fine for an agentic-first development workflow.
End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the relative proportion of outsized, lauded photographers remained fairly constant. The upshot is that WAY more people are exposed to the possibility of creating excellence than before, the downside is the market gets flooded with utility and mediocrity. Said excellence never goes away, and the same will apply to software.
The very idea that SaaS (or packaged software, or whatever) "will die" because "anybody" can prompt their way to a "personal tool" (as a mainstream exercise) is so far-fetched to me because the only people who will prompt their way to a tool ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
Professionals who need functionality will always pay for it.
Boomer dads who can barely work a DVR will always pay for it.
Business owners who need less friction and more reliability will always pay for it.
IMO, this "I'll just replace Salesforce with my own personal CRM for $200 for a month of Claude" thing is just a hobbyist's pipe dream lol -- not that there's anything wrong with it, some people will do it, but, man, there's a reason that Netflix is Netflix, and Plex isn't Netflix.
I don’t understand why Netflix needs 3500 engineers. They built what needed to be built already.
Other thing I have experienced is my standards have changed a lot, now for $10 subscription I need a lot more, not just some simple editor or a small todolist would suffice anymore. I am not thinking about paying for new software, and in fact I am getting completely burnt out by all the sites looking the same.
The cynical approach would be to make the product hard to leave. But that just means you've built a trap, not something people actually want. Eventually they escape and hate you for it.
The test I use: would people recommend this to colleagues even if there's no referral incentive? If the answer is no, I'm probably building something people tolerate rather than something they value.
Where I could see some really interesting results is the marriage of the two. For example, you have a solid data structure that an LLM can generate infinite custom views from.
And I have first hand knowledge of well-known companies building their own tooling because the SaaS offerings have a bad price/feature ratio.
but from good apis, good data, good interface they can generate quite nice frontends.
i guess, frontend as job is going to have a hard time.
also, writing code is not cognitive load, its always reading code. and llms just increase that. so i mostly try to avoid using them.
but i do like researching with them. context free. like googles ai mode, etc. not from my code editor cause then they get biased and suggest stupid sh8t all the time.
The recommendation thing is a nice benchmark, but if you're building hyper-specific tools - why would people recommend them to anyone? If you build a tool for an accountant that does some very niche thing only they're bothered by, why would they recommend to the analyst or receptionist in the company?
We have so many people who are so excellent and fast and developing nowadays that we can even afford the time to build things for our community, friends and even just for ourselves.
It has probably always been like this, but I am just personally observing a higher-degree of people doing and talking about it. Even just the small-web/neocities bobble points into this.
Now that Prometheus (the myth, not the o11y tool) has dropped these LLMs on us, I've been using this thought experiment to consider the multi-layered implications:
In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food?
Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like?
If so, what is your setup/workflow?
Now I wonder if the maintenance cost for this type of internal system has gone down to a level where that is no longer an issue.
Or a vibe-coded simple website.
But "designed and implemented company-wide intranet" looks good in someone's CV so here we are.
Vibe-coding accelerates the destruction of basic (closed-source) apps charging a subscription for features that offer little to no value whatsoever.
I replaced a whole bunch of these with one shot prompts for shits and giggles.
But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.
Their problem is solved, now it's up to me to update the internal guidelines and agent instructions so that the code is at least semi-decent.
None of these are going to "production", they all live on local company controlled laptops and only one of them might access an external API automatically later this spring.
But each of them takes hours of manual work and does it in minutes.
However, with a proper framework (e.g., a very opinionated design system, the ability to choose from some pre-designed structures/flows, etc.) I could very much see ad hoc creation of software becoming more widespread.
And this is comparing to being subscribed many years in a row. With SaaS you can unsub and sub only when you need it again.
With your side project - a weekend of your life is invested and you will never get it back.
This is the worst use of your time if you measure it in $. If you make it for fun - sure. In all other terms it is a complete loss.
Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes and see if it needs any input. Then I can (not that I do it), read and perhaps learn from the code.
(How? Idk, I just asked it to guide me through the short hook process)
I get a notification on macOS with the title of the context.
It just boggles he mind how divorced from reality some people are. You could offer $fotm_ai_model with infinite usage, free apple developer account (since you're apparently replacing everything you have with homegrown stuff) and the amount of people wasting their weekends on vibe-cloning their own custom apps would still approximate to zero. This doesn't even get to the fact that the majority of apps already HAVE a free alternative, and it's certainly far less effort to replace increasingly obnoxious apple music with foobar than to build, test and then permanently support your own music player. You also probably want claude code 15 to replace anything non-trivial, otherwise, well, good luck.
I don’t think I’d bother even if my weekend had ten times as many hours as it does, and I’m a code monkey that still mostly enjoys his job.
I wonder why people still hold a lot of stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM.
I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the only user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names.
I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I could have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.*
There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.